I normally write my reviews as impersonally as possible and try to be as objective towards a book as I can be. But Neruda, by God, makes me break all those rules. Sometimes, you come across something in life that leaves you so awe-stricken that you lie in bed slack-jawed and pensive for hours on end and just feel. That is what Neruda’s writing did to me. Don’t get me wrong- I am no great romantic- it is melancholy I prefer but there are always exceptions to rules and one such is 100 love sonnets.
Neruda, who won the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote these passionate sonnets for his third wife Matilde Urrutia. The book itself is divided into four sections: Morning, Afternoon, Evening and Night and each conveys a different form of love and ardour. Neruda’s words embody a deep humility that at times roar with ferocious passion and at times whisper like a languid stream. His words have a power and lyricism beyond anything I have read or have ever imagined. He thrums the heartstrings with openhearted words, ’’I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way’’ or wrenches them with painful soliloquies, ’’Another’s. She will be another’s. Like my kisses before. Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes. I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her. Love is short, forgetting is so long’’ but, nevertheless, gives us pleasure and pain in equal measure.
I’ll hazard a guess in assuming that most of you readers will have been in love at least once, requited or unrequited- I know I have. What’s more, some of the more fortunate of us would have experienced the bittersweet melancholy of both. And we all know that there are times when we have no words to express this boundless love we feel or that ocean of pain and infinity of emotion. It is at times like these when Pablo Neruda’s poems hold more meaning that just a lyrical artistry of words and it is at times like these when we can turn to them, in equal parts, for solace or joy. 100 love sonnets is an absolute masterpiece of insatiable intimacy and soul-capturing feelings as primordial as time itself. Read it- it’ll change your life forever.